Wii U Save Data Non-transferable, Why?

Most Wii owners are familiar with the fact that save data from your games can be transferred to an SD Card, and then onto your computer. This allows you the freedom to backup the saves to your hard drive or in the cloud. I myself have all of my Wii saves backed up on the cloud.

This is not possible on the Wii U, as the file system used to format the external USB storage devices is not recognized my most common Operating Systems (I use Ubuntu Linux and while my computer does recognize the USB device, and I can access the device, I cannot actually see any of the files. However, this could be my own systems settings and perhaps another Ubuntu user has better luck viewing files?).

I am left wondering why this is so. No one was able to crack Nintendo's encryption on the Wii downloads, such as Virtual Console titles, so why the overkill in protecting the Wii U saves? Why cripple our ability to save and share save data? This hinders my ability to share my saved game with another gamer who may have trouble beating a level that I've beaten on my save.

I have attempted to come up with a reasonable answer, like preventing piracy or maybe region locking may have something to do with it, and so far nothing really makes sense. It would appear as the only reason Nintendo have opted to cripple our user experience is for the simple fact that they can. I don't want to accept this, so maybe someone out there has a reasonable answer? How does this improve out experience as gamers? I can't backup my files to the cloud. Therefore, if my Wii U breaks and my hard drive backup crashes, then I lose everything. No cloud backup leaves me with nothing... how is that a good thing?

It's easy to understand that they want to prevent people from cheating in games in various ways. However, I agree it would be nice to have the safety of a backup, and I suppose someone will come up with some sort of solution in the future.

I think it may have something to do with Nintendo stopping you from using your hard drive to play back-ups; I tried to install USB Loader on my vWii but after formatting my hard drive using the Wii U, I then found that it was totally unusable and neither my Wii or vWii can detect it when I launch any USB Loader, and I know it is not a compatability issue as I could back-up and play my Wii games on my black Wii without problems. Unfortunately I cannot try to reformat my hard drive on my computer as it is not compatible with Windows 8.

...Unfortunately I cannot try to reformat my hard drive on my computer as it is not compatible with Windows 8.

This is where having a Linux system comes in handy. If you plug a Wii U formatted hard drive into a Linux computer it will recognize the drive and you can then format it to a Windows compatible format. So... maybe run Ubuntu Linux in a Virtual Machine on your Windows PC? That may work, but having never tried it I can't make any promises.

Also, you may want to try and format the drive using Disk Manager in Windows 8.

Pretty sure you will be able to format it in Disk Management on Windows 8. You just need to delete the partition on the drive (if there is one) and then create a new one as the Wii U probably messed up the partition table.

Overkill would be doing something aggressively like doing online checks every 24 hours.

This is passive, and will be broken if it hasn't been already so you can back up your files.

This is overkill in the sense that they are taking needless steps to hinder out experience. If there was an issue with the Wii then this would make sense. Since no hacker was able to do anything to decrypt Wii data I fail to see the reasoning behind crippling our experience as users. It's completely unwarranted.

This is overkill in the sense that they are taking needless steps to hinder out experience. If there was an issue with the Wii then this would make sense. Since no hacker was able to do anything to decrypt Wii data I fail to see the reasoning behind crippling our experience as users. It's completely unwarranted.

I just got the wii u and it became clear to me what the wii u is about. In spite what Nintendo has to say about the new wii u, only one word comes to mind is control, this time the control is at user level instead of box level like the first wii. I have become to regret getting the wii u as it lacks user settings and save data settings as transfer data between users. Its like getting a new car and you cant use it because your wife put gas in it. If this was not the case they would of had shared options as for the family games like 3D world.

Yeah I don't think it wouldn't be hard to implement a file share system in the games as it stands now, but Nintendo never bothered to make any guidelines.
I think the GameCube had the the best implementation, up to two memory card that could be managed by the console itself, while games having a more granular control over game moving and management.